Saturday, October 8, 2005

Sam and I had a great weekend at ConvergeSouth. Thanks to the organizers (Sue, Ed, Jay, Ben) who made everything run smoothly, and the many participants who were lively, interesting, funny, kind, and provocative.

My personal highlights:

Learning about the subtly-textured moral, emotional, and political world of military bloggers in Iraq. The News & Record's Allison Perkins and military wife Christy Seals were humane and insightful, and were true to their experiences and emotions about war blogging: patriotism, pride, love for the soldiers, fear for their soldiers' well-being, doubt about U.S. policy. The Shu was informative about where to find military blogs.

Roch Smith, Jr. led a great session on blogs and local alternative media, and even talked about his own alt-media creation, Greensboro101.com (after we prodded him a little).

I got to participate as a panelist at a session moderated by John Robinson on "Blogging and Journalism." I talked too much about myself. If I had to do it over, I'd have shut up more and tried to make John talk about the ways blogging and journalism entwine and occasionally collide here in Greensboro.

And Sam was asked by the organizers to help out with a "how-to-blog" session for beginners -- Sam loved it, and of course his dad was pretty proud, too.

The blogger BBQ was a blast. Sam took photos, and Tom Lassiter has a 360-view (Quicktime required) of Hoggard's place just before everyone started showing up. I got a quick Swahili lesson from Ndesanjo Macha and met more bloggers than you can shake a stick at.

You should be proud. He's every bit as snarky as you but with red hair. (Well, with hair...) Sam was a huge help in our "how-to" session and I was thrilled to have him there. Next year, let him out of school for Friday's session.